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You mean like stocks, bonds, or any other commodity in existence? Yeah, the value is fairly unstable currently, largely because the current valuation is being driven almost entirely by speculation, however that is set to change. There's already a lot of interest being shown by various retailers in accepting bitcoin as a form of payment. Currently as an actual currency you can use to buy stuff (as opposed to a commodity being traded) it's fairly rare, but as it becomes increasingly common you should see the price fluctuations start to damp down as more and more real world goods starting having their values tied to the value of the currency.

I'm definitely shocked by the rapid climb in price we've seen recently. It's unclear if this is a short term bubble driven by rampant speculation and renewed media interest, or if this represents the new "normal" and with the new interest the currency was effectively massively under-valued before now. It's even possible that if there's significant interest shown by some major players (say if for instance amazon and facebook signed on to allow payments/money transfers via bitcoin) we might see yet another massive upward valuation of the currency.



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